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Social Network for Schools

Challenge

Our challenge was to lead the creation of a safe, online content sharing application for thousands of K-12 schools, colleges and universities across the country. This application would allow students, parents and teachers to take, share, and interact with photos and videos taken of school activities. The new social network needed to integrate directly with existing yearbook authoring software, image and video repositories, identify management systems, and ERP to allow content to ow freely between the applications.

Our client envisioned a system that was:

Personalized and user-friendly

Moderated for appropriate content

Flexible, reliable and state-of-the-art

Supportive of academic progress

Available across multiple devices

Solutions

sdg was responsible for all facets of the software development lifecycle. Members of our team led a blended resource development model of near shore, offshore and local resources. The team created an application based on Wordpress for user and meta management, a responsive MVC patterned theme for desktops and tablets, an auto-scaling Java-based mobile services layer, and native mobile applications serving iOS and Android platforms. The application is hosted on Amazon Web Services and integrates with a half-dozen additional third party cloud-based solutions.

Benefits of the new system included:

Easy, consistent and user-friendly navigation regardless of device

Near real time access to photos and videos for students, parents and staff

24/7 live content moderation via mechanical turk

Apps deployed to Apple iStore and Android Marketplace

sdg consultants served our client in the following roles:

Program planning and management

Agile project delivery and release management

User experience and interface design

Ecology design and architecture

Application and integration development

Quality assurance management

System monitoring and performance tuning

Today, our client has seen over 12,000 schools utilizing the network with over 50,000 total app downloads and over 18 million images and videos – and it’s just getting started! The iOS app alone has consistently ranked in the top 100 downloaded social networking apps within iTunes since launch.

technologies used

collaboration starts with communication

We would love to hear the results you are looking for or the problem you are trying to solve. Our passion is working with engaged partners to help their businesses perform better.